“A hundred thirty-two.”
“There must be twenty or thirty more on the southern boundary,” Andrei said quickly, his mind calculating and making decision upon decision. He fished around the table top for Wolf’s duplicate map of the sewer system. He marked in a routing. ...
“I’m going back to Mila 18,” he said. “You stay here. At four o’clock I will have rounded up your people and any survivors around Mila 18. We are going to make a diversionary attack on the western side of the ghetto to draw the Germans away long enough for you to take to the sewers. There is only one thing important now. Christopher de Monti must be saved.”
“I’ll go with you to Mila 18,” Tolek said. “Wolf will take them through the sewers.”
“We’ve got no time for this nonsense. You’ll take them through the sewers!”
Tolek clenched his teeth and nodded in obedience.
“At four o’clock when we make our attack you will break radio silence and send a message to the Aryan side that you will be coming out at Prosta Street.”
Tolek’s eyes narrowed.
“Prosta Street! But ... through this course it is over five miles through small connecting pipes! It’s impossible. It will take six or seven hours!”
“Every damned fool who tries the sewers obliges the Germans by walking down main lines. These small laterals are your only chance.”
“The Vistula is running high. Well have to go on our hands and knees in the small pipes. We’ll drown.”
Andrei punched Tolek on the shoulder. “You’ll make it, Tolek. Living Zionism, you know.”
Tolek took the map from Andrei. “I’ll try.”
Andrei stepped out to the main room. He collected the half dozen bulletless guns and pistols and strapped them on his back and tucked them into his waist.
“Well,” he said, “you go to the sewers at four o’clock. Tolek and Wolf will take you through a new route. Have a good trip. See you next year in Jerusalem.”
Wolf and Chris and Rachael stood at the ladder leading out of the Franciskanska bunker, blocking Andrei’s way.
“We heard,” Chris said. “Mila 18 has been attacked. We’re going back with you.”
“Uh-uh,” Andrei answered.
“Don’t try to stop us,” Chris threatened.
In a single motion Andrei jerked Chris’s pistol from his belt and knocked Wolf Brandel flat on his back and shoved his niece sprawling.
“Tolek!” he said, flipping the pistol to him. “If either of these two move, use the pistol. You have my orders to put one through Wolf’s brain. As for Chris, just wing him—but not too seriously, or else he will be a horrible burden dragging through the sewers.”
Chris made an angry pass at Andrei, but Tolek was between them and the cocked pistol was leveled on him. There was no doubt in Chris’s mind that Tolek would follow Andrei’s orders. He snarled, then backed off.
“Chris ...” Andrei said softly. “Don’t forget where those journals are buried ... will you?”
“I won’t forget,” Chris answered hoarsely. “I won’t forget.”
Andrei took two steps up the ladder.
“Uncle Andrei!” Rachael cried.
He stepped down for an instant, and she flung her arms around him and wept.
“It is good,” Andrei said, “that even in this place we still have tears left for each other and broken hearts. It is good that we are still human. Rachael ... you will go from this place and become a fine woman.”
“Good-by, Uncle Andrei.”
Outside, Andrei wrapped the rags on his feet tightly and began darting over the rubble, playing cat-and-mouse with the crisscrossing searchlights, flopping flat ahead of the hurling bombs. A few things left that would burn seared and sizzled. A wall tottered behind him and crashed, sending flying debris about his head. He groped and stumbled and fell and ran in the holocaust.
In an hour he reached Mila 18.
The Germans were gone. As always, they left a bunker after they had poured gas and gunfire and bullets into it, returning in two or three days to send in their dogs before they dared enter themselves. Andrei climbed down the main entrance from the demolished Mila 18. The poison gas had spent its fury.
He was in the small corridor lined with tiny cells. He was standing on a mass of entwined corpses. His flashlight played over them. He pushed into the commander’s cell. It was empty. He found Rabbi Solomon in his cell, still stretched on his cot, a Torah in his waxy hands.
Andrei stepped over the bodies into the main corridor. The Chelmno room with its ammunition stores was a sight of devastation. Bodies were charred, unrecognizable from the explosions of the bottle bombs.
Wait!
Coughs!
Weak ... weak coughs!
Sounds of gagging and gasping from the Majdanek room.
Andrei plunged over the bodies.
“Simon! Deborah! Alex!” his lone voice called in the dark.
His light sped frantically over the bodies in Majdanek. Two or three of them were breathing with the desperation of fish out of water.
“Simon!”
Andrei rolled over the body of his commander. Simon Eden was dead. And then the light fell on the lifeless face of Alexander Brandel holding his infant Moses against his chest.
He turned the corpses over one by one. Fighters who had tried to hold back the civilians. Children ... children ... children ... and the light poked at the bricks removed to the sewer.
“Deborah!”
He knelt behind the body of his sister, who hung half in, half out of the room, stricken down while passing a child through the sewer to the safety of Mila 19. As he touched her she gasped. There was yet life!
“Deborah!”
“Don’t ... Don’t ...”
“Deborah ... you’re alive!”
“Don’t ... look at me ... I am blind.”
“Oh God! Deborah ... oh, my sister ... oh, my sister ...” He lifted her in his arms and found a corner and held her and rocked her back and forth and kissed her cheeks.
She coughed and gagged in terrible pain. “Some children are alive in Mila 19,” she rasped.
“Ssshhh ... don’t talk ... don’t talk.”
“Chris ... Rachael ... Wolf ...”
“Yes, darling ... yes. They have escaped. They are safe.”
She made a sound of relief and groaned as the sharpness of the gas jabbed her lungs.
“Andrei ... pain ... children in pain. Kill them ... put them out of their misery ...”
“Deborah! Deborah! Deborah!”
“So good ... you holding ... me ... Andrei ... I lost my pill ... please ... give ... me ... one.”
Andrei reached in his breast pocket and took a small cyanide capsule and put it against his sister’s parched lips.
“So good ... you holding me ... I was afraid I’d be alone. Andrei ... sing Momma’s song ... when we were children ...”
“What is the best Sehora?
My baby ... will ... learn the Torah. ...”
Chapter Twenty-two
GABRIELA BOLTED UPRIGHT IN bed, her heart pounding unmercifully. A dream of a chill wind passing through the room was unfounded. She perspired from the clarity of the nightmare. Andrei was a ghost floating over the smoldering rubble of the ghetto. She rolled to one side and squinted to read the luminous dial of the bedside clock. Three forty-five.
She flicked on the radio automatically, as she always did during the waking hours. Perhaps there would be a radio signal from the ghetto transmitter today. There had been none for twenty-six days, since the last time they fetched four children out of the sewers and took them to Father Kornelli. Twenty-six days of silence.
She slipped into a dressing gown and walked out to the fifth-story balcony. Far from the dream of cold, it was warmish out, fighting its way into late spring. Moonlight threw light on the ghetto. She watched for ever so long, just as she had stood and watched for hour after hour during the day. She had taken the new apartment because of its view of the ghetto.